The London Homeopathic hospital was built solely from contributions from homeopaths and the homeopathic community and at no point were any public monies used in its construction. The building was given to the NHS in 1948. The recent refurbishment of the hospital was paid for by a completely different part of the NHS budget than that used for clinical care, and as the Hospital building in Great Ormond Street houses three hospitals, the homeopathic hospital benefited from an overall renovation project.

The picture is of a Royal London Homeopathic Hospital nurse’s long service medal, and there is a large representation of this medal in the tiled floor of the main entrance.

The usual toasts were given, viz– “The Queen;” “The Prince Consort and the Royal Family;” and “The Army and Navy,” responded to by Henry Robinson Montagu 6th Baron Rokeby and Edmund Gardiner Fishbourne, who alluded to their experience of the benefits personally derived by them from homeopathy during their service in the Niger expedition and in the Crimea.

The Chairman then proposed “Success to the London Homeopathic Hospital,” which was enthusiastically received. From the statement of the chairman it appeared that the institution was opened in 1850, at a house rented for that purpose in Golden Square, and had been removed, last October, to freehold premises in Great Ormond Street, WC, purchased for £5,000.

During its existence the hospital had, at an average expenditure of £1,000 a year, afforded relief to 23,000 sick persons, of whom nearly 1200 were in-patients. The returns of treatment were stated to prove the advantages of homeopathy.

Thus, while, according to the Registrar General, the rate of mortality in the allopathic metropolitan hospitals is 7.5 per cent, the deaths in the Homeopathic Hospital, including those from cholera, have not exceeded 4.6 per cent.

The premises recently purchased in Great Ormond Street are estimated to provide accommodation for almost 200 in-patients, and, when the necessary alterations are completed, there will be two accident wards, a ward for children, a theatre for a school of medicine, &c.

The estimated cost of these alterations, and of fittings and furniture, is £4,000, and contributions have been received which reduce the amount to £2,500. The total receipts since the opening of the hospital have amounted to £15,000; and the management had thus far not only defrayed current expenses, but had been enabled to purchase the new premises, besides investing £800 towards the formation of an endowment fund.

The musical arrangements were under the direction of Mr G Buckland, who was assisted by Messrs Lockey, Young and H Buckland. It may be added that there are homeopathic hospitals in Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Moscow, and St Petersburg.

William Vaughan Morgan suggested at the 39th Annual General Meeting the desirability of pulling down the old Great Ormond Street Hospital and building the present modern Hospital, and contributed £ 3,000 to the Building Fund.

This increase, without exaggeration by leaps and bounds, naturally entailed a corresponding increase in the cost of maintenance. The expenditure for the first year in Golden Square was £600; while that for the years 1855-59 was nearly £500 per mouth, or about £6,000 per annum. (The expenditure for last year, 1913, in the present enlarged hospital of 163 beds, was £13,359).

The building, as it was then, had been adapted from three very old houses, and was, after all that had been done for it in the way of reconstruction and sanitation, very antiquated, as compared with the more modern hospital buildings of that time. Large sums had been spent upon it, a constant outlay for repairs being necessary to maintain it in working order.

In the year 1890 the Board, under the chairman ship of William Vaughan Morgan, decided that a special effort should be made to provide a building more suitable for the work of the Hospital and worthy of the science of Homeopathy. Accordingly some of the best friends of the hospital were approached.

A generous lady, Miss J. Durning Smith, who had for many years munificently supported the Hospital, signified her intention to contribute the sum of £10,000 under the pseudonym of “A Friend well known to the Hospital.”

The extension of the London Homeopathic Hospital building on the adjoining freehold ground, including the Queen’s Head public house, which by this date had been purchased for the purpose, was now very forcibly impressed upon the Board of Management.

That there was now very forcibly impressed upon the Board of Management. That there was an urgent need for enlargement was only too apparent when serious cases frequently had to be refused admission because there was no room to receive them.

In one small section only of the In patients, nine women each waited over three months, and eight others waited over six months for admission. The present London Homeopathic Hospital Building has now been in use for sixteen years, 1895 – 1911, and during the last eight years in the old building in Great Ormond Street the In-patients totaled: 1887 to 1895 ….. 5,680 In the next two periods of eight years in the present building the In patient had increased to: 1895 to 1902 ….. 8,150 In patients 1903 to 1911 ….. 8,699.

Their consultation issued in the nomination of a Provisional Committee constituted by representatives of the principal homeopathic activities in Great Britain, and the publication of a statement of the case, with an appeal for funds to those favourably inclined to the work.

Thus did the leaders of British Homeopathy lead, and the response of the English speaking homeopaths the world over was immediate and maintained.

Fortified by this support, the Provisional Committee nominated two Commissioners Ethelbert Petrie Hoyle and David MacNish to proceed to France to confer with the military authorities there, as well as with the principal homeopathic physicians in Paris.

As the issue of this investigation, the Committee decided to work under the auspices of the French Red Cross Society, and to internationalism as far as possible, the interest it was desirable to arouse of homeopathic supporters in this special procedure.

Three doctors on the teaching staff were later appointed Royal physicians: John Weir, Marjorie Grace Blackie and Ronald W Davey. Llewelyn Ralph Twentyman remains the doyen of them all, surviving to tell the tale of the lectures often given in the Hospital Board Room, which were much enjoyed by everyone.

In 1960, Sir Colville Herbert Sanford Barclay 14th Baronet 1913 – 2010 (a British naval officer, painter and botanist whose career spanned amphibious landings and commando operations off the coast of France during the Second World War, having his paintings exhibited at the Royal Academy, publishing reference works about the flora of Crete and taking commissions to obtain plant samples from across the world for the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew) became an advocate of homeopathic medicine and spent forty years on the board of the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital.

From http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11624495 Int Hist Nurs J. 2000 Spring;5(2):20-7. Nurse education at the London Homeopathic Hospital 1903-1947: preparation for professional specialists or marginalised Cinderellas? Lorenzton M. Imperial College School of Medicine, London, UK. 2000 – Nurse education at the London Homeopathic Hospital 1903-1947: preparation for professional specialists or marginalised Cinderellas? Lorenzton M. Imperial College School of Medicine, London, UK. Int Hist Nurs J. 2000 Spring;5(2):20-7. This paper provides a summarised account of research in progress on Nurses’ Registers from the London Homeopathic Hospital, 1903-1947. The particular question addressed in this paper relates to nurses role in homeopathy at the hospital during the above period, as it emerges from the registers. Comparison with nursing at the hospital in the 1990s is provided by reference to a research report by Clara Harris, who conducted research on contemporary nurses’ role at the hospital. The role of nurses is seen in the context of the uneasy relationship between homeopathic and orthodox doctors. Research on the Nurses’ Registers forms part of a larger project concerning the history of the London Homeopathic Hospital from 1889 till 1947. The first phase of the research, conducted jointly by Bernard Leary (a homeopathic doctor) and Anna Bosanquet (a social scientist) and author (1993-95), and funded by the Wellcome Trust, related to analysis of 300 volumes of clinical patient notes (approximately 60,000 individual records) from the period 1889-1923, which were found in the hospital basement by the domestic services manager in 1992. Phase 2 of this research project is being undertaken by the author without funding and was commenced in 1996. Nurses’ Registers from the period 1903-1947 were analysed in detail, recording a wide range of information about student nurses at the hospital during this period. Data from the 1903-1947 registers will be compared with information collected by Clara Harris in a project funded by the old North East Thames Regional Health Authority in 1922. The role of nurses in the nineteenth century and at the present time will be seen in the context of medical homeopathic practice, and the relevant research by Nicholls is referred to briefly. It is important to stress that the discussion relates to homeopathic nursing, not to nurses who have left their nursing posts to become ‘lay’ homeopaths (the title used by homeopathic doctors for all non-medical homeopathic practitioners).

From 16.9.2010, the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital changed its name to the Royal London Hospital for Integrated Medicine (RLHIM) to better reflect the developing services now available at the hospital.

Fantastic history thank you
I’ve been a homeopath and used homeopathy with great success for myself and my patients for 25 years!
And saved the NHS millions after calculating the costs of acute and chronic diseases!
Homeopathy is only suppressed in the uk and America they need to move past the ” healthcare is a business attitude”